I was looking at the onion I’d recently purchased with something close to despair. To be honest, my extreme disappointment was directed at slightly more than half of it, but it was hard to discern the exact border of what was triggering my emotion because the usable half was one end of a continuum of rot that ended in a brown, stinking, soft, disgusting part. My angst was not due to being overly tied to the state of the onion for my mental health, but that this was one of many, many onions that I had purchased like this recently, and I really needed a good amount of healthy onion for tonight’s dinner.

Then, I reached for a head of garlic. Every clove had that little green shoot seeking sun and soil for its evolutionary destiny of becoming its own garlic in the world. I know those shoots make the garlic less flavorful and a bit bitter, but I chose to overlook this for convenience, and dug them out.

Why can’t this country pull it together enough to have decent onions and garlic, given that those alliums are the bedrock of Italian cuisine? I could always count on a decent onion or head of garlic in California. Why can’t I here?

I went to the farm stand for my usual produce run. They grow a lot of what they sell. As well as kittens. There are currently five small, furry terrors underfoot. One was drenched from batting at the hose that hung from a hook. Another attacked my feet whenever I approached the artichokes. I looked at the onions and they were sorry little things with some mush visible from the outside. I turned to Michele, the farmer, and asked what’s up with the onions these days. He looked at me like I had just asked him the stupidest question on earth. Speaking slowing, clearly, and calmly, he said “Because onions and garlic are not in season.” Wait. Rewind. ONIONS AND GARLIC HAVE A SEASON? He said not to expect any decent onions until Ferragosto, a holiday on August 15th. Until then, I should plan to use spring onions and garlic shoots, he explained calmly, as to a child who had not realized something totally obvious.

I’m telling you this because I think it’s central to what makes or breaks many people’s experiences living abroad. You either find the story above funny, as I do, or you would be frustrated and a little angry that you can’t get what you want, when you want it. I think a lot of having success living abroad boils down to this difference—let’s call it The Onion Test™. (I’m so delighted with this term that I am going to throw that ™ around just so it gets adequate respect.)

I’ve thought about this a bit after reading the article about the American couple who retired from San Francisco to Nimes, France, and decided to return to the U.S., as life abroad was “a nightmare” for them. They found that living in another country gave them “too much grief, and no joy.” She hadn’t had time to learn any French, but felt isolated after not being able to make any good French friends, and didn’t want to hang out with expats. The bureaucracy frustrated them, like when they found it hard to ship their car over (instead of just buying one in France). But the thing that went viral was a photo of her standing in an aisle of a grocery store, holding some limp celery, and complaining that she couldn’t find any decent produce in France. Their conclusion was that living in a place was very different from taking a vacation there.

There has been a flurry of analysis online about this couple and their choices, the vast majority scathing, and almost universally coming back to the overused quote “Wherever you go, there you are”. Certainly true, especially as Buckaroo Bonzai said it, but I think The Onion Test™ is a bit more specific and revealing.

Our Americans in the produce section are not alone. I used to belong to a few Italian expat forums on Facebook, hoping for some good advice, but the five or six big ones I belonged to turned out to be mainly places for people to complain. A lot. And the bottom line about what people were bothered about is that life in Italy is different from life in America or Britain. Examples large and small abounded, but sometimes the little things, like not having fresh onions year-round or limp celery, seemed to cause the most anger and disappointment. I’ve also seen this play out in my personal experience. What seems to be common about those expats who flourish is a sense of curiosity and openness about the alien place they’ve landed.

Before anyone picks up their lives and moves abroad, like we did twelve years ago, it’s important to do your research, of course, but I think it’s even more important to look in the mirror. Can you find delight in simple moments that turn your expectations upside down, sometimes in disappointing ways? Because that can happen a couple times a day. Some days this is tough going. To me, life here is a bit of a puzzle, and I find that actually fun, most of the time. If you think it’s a good thing to have things be different from your expectations, I’d say go for it. But if you need things to go your way and to be in control, forget about it. Things aren’t always easy and sometimes don’t resolve as I’d hoped, but I am struggling to think of an instance when it didn’t work out, reveal something, or deepen my understanding of this place and its people. And many times gave me a good story or something to laugh about.

And no matter who you are, I think the best thing we did was to “prototype” our move. We made everything in our California lives reversible, if need be. We rented our house fully furnished, took a leave of absence from the kids’ school, etc. We could have stepped back in our old lives very easily. And this freed us to embrace every day without looking back.

But after thinking about this, my biggest question is why, living in France, the land of spectacular village markets, was she buying celery at the grocery store? I bet that France sighed with collective relief when their plane took off.